In the Beginning by Robert Silverberg Read Free Book Online Page B

intervener…royal sacrifice.”
    “Sacrifice? What? When?”
    She launched into a string of words, and the converter brought them over all too clearly. “Tomorrow is the day you go to the gods, and I should be happy. But I’m sad. I’ll miss you.”
    “You mean the Kejwa gets killed?” he asked desperately.
    “Oh, no,” the converter translated. “Not killed. You go to meet the gods, to intervene in our favor. One of us is chosen every year. This year you came to us from above and it was good.”
    “Where do the gods live?”
    She pointed. “Down there. At the bottom of the lake. It is deep. We have never been able to reach the bottom.”
    Crayden’s insides jangled. Royal sacrifice? Bottomless lake? So that was the catch?
    The Crayden luck was just about being stretched to the breaking-point. For a second his old optimism asserted itself, and he told himself confidently that now that the converter worked he’d be able to talk the natives out of sacrificing him.
    But the bleak truth was apparent, and for the first time in his life Crayden saw there was no opportunity he could cling to. Except—except—
    ***
    He looked out the door of the hut. The night was black. He tiptoed out softly. “Keep quiet,” he told her.
    He crept through the sleeping village to the stream where he had so boldly disposed of the rescue-beam radiator the other day. He hadn’t needed it, then, but he did now. If he could find it, he could call the Patrol and get taken back to the prison planet, where he could start all over. He’d break out again, he was sure. For Steve Crayden, optimism was an incurable disease.
    Grimly calling on whoever had been taking care of him up till then, he got down on his knees in the water and began to grope frantically for the rescue-beam radiator he’d thrown—who knew where?—somewhere in the stream.
    He moved inch-by-inch over the stream’s shallow bed, searching fruitlessly. He refused to give up. The cool waters of the stream washed the feverish sweat from him and left him chilled and shivering.
    When the aliens came for him the next morning, he was a hundred yards upstream, blindly rooting up handfuls of mud, still confident he was going to find the rescue beam. It wasn’t till the priest held him poised above the sparkling blue waters of the bottomless lake and started to release him, as a glad cry went up from the watchers—it wasn’t until then that he came to the final realization that there were no angles left for him to play.
    But he was still expecting a last-minute miracle as he hit the water. This time there wasn’t any.

Guardian of the Crystal Gate
    (1956)
    Amazing Stories and its companion magazine, Fantastic Adventures, were big, shaggy pulps published by Ziff-Davis of Chicago. They featured fast-paced adventure stories aimed at adolescent boys, a group to which I belonged when I started reading them in 1948. I loved nearly everything I read, had fantasies of writing for them some day, and had no idea that the two books were staff-written by a dozen or so regular contributors whose work was bought without prior editorial reading and who worked mainly under pseudonyms that the editor, Ray Palmer, would stick on their material at random. (About fifteen different writers were responsible over the years for the stories bylined “Alexander Blade,” who was one of my special favorites when I was about 14.)
    While I was still an Alexander Blade fan Ziff-Davis moved its operations to New York. Editor Palmer preferred to stay behind in Chicago. The new editor was a big, burly, good-natured man named Howard Browne, who had been one of Palmer’s stable of regulars, producing undistinguished stories for him in the mode of Robert E. Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs under an assortment of names. Indeed, Browne thought that science fiction and fantasy was pretty silly stuff. What he preferred was detective stories. His own favorite writer was Raymond Chandler and he had written a number of